A Ten Minute Dream in the Passenger's Seat

And if you swear
that there's
no truth
and who cares,
how come you say it
like you're right?
--Conor Oberst (whom I think is a bit of a pretentious wanker)

Hee

Too bad I only feel this way about Vimes.

Erised

I'll be there
as soon as I can,
but I'm busy mending all the
pieces of
the life I had
before.
Before you.
--Matthew Bellamy
Isn't he just the sweetest?
Okay, so I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, and I get to the part where he gets busted by the retarded girl for saying obscene things and being a commie, and I start thinking, that girl should get punched in the ovaries.
Not literally, of course, but she should at least be sat down and given a stern talking to.
Really unloving, what she did.
Cough.
I am so happy right now. I've been enjoying one of those butterscotch lollies from See's candies.
Last year, the sample-girl was a mindbendingly hot thing called Makayla, or something. She had pretty blue eyes, and she couldn't make up her mind whether to flirt with me or my roommate. It was epic.
I'm off the save the world!
Oh.
Have a pretty piece of poetry, from a man that both Seamus Heaney and I love.

Relic

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

Ted Hughes

i wonder where he got his scars

I never say how lovely tea is.
I've actually managed to have a nap (o noes! the evil nap!), and I'm perking myself up with a cuppa...and o, dear God it is one of the most fabulous things.
I just listened to your single, Nicky, and I think it's...very you. You little fruitsation, you. I had this sudden, awful, wonderful memory of you playing me those sad little punk songs you used to write about me (which were never terribly complimentary, but hey, we were sixteen). I still don't like your nasal, whingey, Blink 182 voice, but awh...you're all growed up and making music!
So, there's this graphic novel. It was written by a bloke called Gibson Twist, and the art is done (I think) by Ben Steeves, and, as it was Gibson's birthday just a bit ago, I'm going to go ahead and tell everyone I know (via blog) that he's a pretty brilliant bloke, and his work is probably the most realism you're ever going to get from a webcomic. Go look at it.
Erm. Yes. I've been trying to write poetry.
I'm not getting away with it.
I mean, it's good stuff.
But it's pointless.
If you can find a point in it, please tell me.
This one's called L'Enfant Trouvé, une femme. (pretentious? moi?)

O, Hadasseh,
daughter of the
morning, did you fall
to earth like lightning?
Did you make a
storm of absinthe in your
sugar-jewelled tea-cup?

The fairest broken
nightingale sings tinny
lullabies, harmonised
to delicate, edible
suede-soft whispers
in the dread of
summer nights.

I am the child of
promise, leaked,
by aneurysm, onto your
shoulder, haemhorraged
grey matter, composing,
composing, the ode
to joy, deafly.

This is your volatile
tenderness; a vacuous
seduction, a holocaust;
the tanned-tissue lamps
are given to Diogenes,
with my heart thrown
wide open, just for you.
(fin)
and scales.
Also, TERRY PRATCHETT!

Seamus Heaney

I love him.
Lots.
And I really, really want to read his Beowulf, but I can't seem to find the time.
And Neil Gaiman has done his best to ruin the legend.
The tosser.
But here, have some Seamus.

Death of a Naturalist

All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shalves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hadges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

the skin is peeling
off my hands
in paper-fine layers.

Drujan

I am the eponymous hero
Given to a thirsting world.
Manna, manna! They speak with bristling hands
And waking eyes, all joy-stricken, and deceived.

I have delivered lark-kisses
In the seafoam surge of horror,
In the purple-embroidered night
With its diamond-facet stars.

O my Navigator, my scourgèd medicine,
Physick to my adulterous bonhomie,
Reigning, the tyrant
Over my withered iron empire.

I watch the water drying from
My jade-dog opium pipe.
Conqueror of life, the sacred fire
Burns once again in Persia's heart.

You were my gilded Auschwitz,
The death-camp of my past,
Tanning my masks into your flesh,
Beautifying your ligaments.

I hide your guiding illumination,
O brilliant Northern Star.
My compasses demagnetised
Beneath the westward grievance.
(finis)
Sunday, 3 August, 2008
9.33 Pacific.

once upon a time
I went
nuclear--
with a cellular decon
struction
five-point-two on the Richter.
I will mend it?

drinking worm-wood bitters
from the husk of a fallen star
let.
reddened hair spilt over my pillow.
do
sit
down,
you're making me
nervous.

my darling
self
shines.

Okay, mes amis, my faithful little lurve kittens!
I'm back from the other end of the globe, so to speak, with a couple more neck kinks and a couple fewer other kinks. Lucky you, I'm in the mood for a good, old-fashioned ramble.
I know I haven't been blogging regularly for a while, now, and that is, in the main, due to the fact that I almost invariably ramble, like I'm doing now, about nonsense, and occasionally post a photograph of a mindbogglingly sexy person, but I'm going to go ahead and switch it up a little.
Hand to God, you know I adore all you hardworking bassists out there, but really...the way to pick up women is to play the shaker.
I have a couple of poems in the works, but I've got to edit them pretty heavily, except for this one, and only because it's so ruddy short.
Bear with me. Here goes.

dance my quadrille,
shark-like
and sleek
beneath
my palms--
just so.
(finis)

There. Told you it was short.
In other news, I watched the Dark Knight film, and, against my own force of will and determination not to go with the swarm of people who raved about Heath's performance, I'm gonna have to admit, I liked him so much.
So much.
Hotter than ever.
And Christian Bale, for once, didn't give the impression that he was in desperate need of emergency surgery to remove whatever was rammed so hard up his colon, praise God. He was vaguely likeable.
Urb. I would love to post a picture of some deviously brilliant piece of artwork that I've just done, but to tell you the truth, nothing's been very forthcoming. I have a two-hour sketch of an unearthly beautiful man, whom I'm going to be lusting after for quite some time, despite his fictionality, but to be perfectly honest, I've been wanting to go the way of Armin Mersmann for a while now, and draw interesting faces.
Now, if I could only yakk myself over to Michigan and sit at his feet as he draws. That would be a dream come true.
Hold on, just a moment, while I lust after his godlike powers with the pencil.
*insert glassy-eyed stare here*
All right, all through.
Erm...here, though, for your consideration.
The watercolour isn't quite finished, I need some more practise with fabric, and the forearm...well...I wasn't feeling very confident with the muscles. I'll find some reference and finish it soon. It's called 'Youth with Minarets,' and it's a piece in a weird mix of styles. I was experimenting with some really cold-press rough paper, which is why the colours aren't as transparent and brilliant as I would like, but it'll have to do. I only thank God that I wasn't tempted to do it in oils. That would have been a fiasco I don't even want to contemplate.
Okay. Here you go.

A Ten-Minute Dream in the Passenger's Seat

Last night I slit open a pack of canvas panels. They're small, nine by twelve inches, and since I grid in half inches, usually, I'll call them eighteen by twenty-fours. I've found that canvas panels are generally just a few millimetres shorter than what they're meant to be. Something to do with the size of the canvas wrapping over the cardboard or somesuch nonsense.
I'm also thinking about doing some arbitrary studies of hands, since I'm so useless at them. I mean, the new study I'm doing involves hands...but one of them is a bit deformed, so I don't think it qualifies. It's more of an abstract shape. Gah. I love hands. They're such beautiful things. And I've been seeing some lovely hands lately. Anyhow.
I think pretty much the only thing I ramble about is art on this blog, really. I don't talk about personal issues or things that are happening to me, because really, who wants to hear that? It's like...someone said something to me a bit ago about how they felt like they'd not been getting any sleep, even though they'd been having a good seven or eight hours a night, and my first reaction (both because I'm a heartless scoundrel, and because I'd not yet had any tea that morning) was, 'who bloody cares?'
That is why I don't ramble on about my personal life, and also because (see above), I am a heartless scoundrel. Erm. Oh, but I do post some very personal poetry, and I think that qualifies. Speaking of which, I do have a piece that no one has seen, ever, but I have read it to a friend over the telephone. I wrote it haaages ago, and I'm sure it has something to do with Ockers.

Brindling, like a fascist child,
I wear the uniform of love,
The barest hint of subtle sweet,
The faintest hum of music.

And o, the wounded sounds you make
When for you I sigh in fear,
If time were ours, how we would feast
On one another's bones.

You are the silk of palm fronds,
Sleek and barbed across my mouth.
A hook, a charm you gave to me
To fletch for you, as I saw fit.

We cut our time in half, for pride,
We chased our own false smiles.
I never gave you more than love,
You never knew the difference.
(finis)

Gosh, I need to learn to be more subtle, don't I? Also, to stop using open quatrains to do my dirty work. I don't know, rhyming seems so pretentious to me, even though I was once really good at unusual rhymes, despite the fact that I used a whole arseload of assonance.
Also, I really, deeply dislike Latin. It's an ugly language. I don't care who says what, it has never sounded anything beside overheady and sepulchral. Honestly! 'Haerebantque in comintante sedebam' blah blah it sounds wretched. It's an ugly language.
Furthermore, I don't really know if I like English, either. Not spoken, anyway. It looks lovely written down, all those curved letters prancing out of my pen so joyfully and meaningfully. You can represent so much in writing, the steadiness of your hand, the slant of your letters. Unfortunately, I need to write sideways because otherwise my handwriting slants left, but that's just a habit from training my hand to lie outside my paper when I'm drawing, so it doesn't smudge. Speaking English has proved to be a near impossibility. I find myself drowning in a phrase that should be simple to speak, but I have made it odious to myself, and others have made it mean nothing. I can't even say some things when I am alone. And I'm talking about ordinary words, nothing sacreligious or any such nonsense. I mean simple things, which are simlpe to type or write. I can't express myself for fear of drowning people.
I blame all those little footnotes in the dictionary saying 'obsolete.' I also blame Gary Oldman, but only because I just happen to be a bit mad for him at the moment. Guh. Cobalt blue and Payne's grey eyes.
Damn him.

I would love to tell you something new. Something relevant. Something exciting. But I haven't got anything new, necessarily, that will entertain you. I've been writing like a maniac, all manner of things, but I can't seem to get a piece of fictional poetry out of my head.
O, dear my lord,
Let this breast
Upon which you have leant
Serve now as your shield.
If that's even how it goes. That, and Israfel. I contemplated writing a myth with a bunch of symbolism concerning the divinity of the feminine, but I flaked out of it cause I don't believe women are divine. Or that any gender is, essentially, divine, in any other way beside the fact that we were fashioned divinely. But that is honestly neither here nor there.
No, what I want to talk to you about is Andrew Motion. Current Poet Laureate, whom I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I admire his work. It's literal, personal, technical in a way that is difficult to use when employing open verse. He managed to make the epitaph of the Queen Mother not at all grandiose or distant, but something everyone could relate to. I think he signifies a lot that is right in the world of poetry, and a lot that isn't. There is no longer any pretension in the idea of divine right of monarchs, and they are sent out of the world with the same sort of affection as someone else's mother is. But still, read this. And tell me. It's called Ice.

When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.

Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.

By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.

By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past -
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.

Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.

Atlantic

I shall never marry Ted Hughes,
Not for old, red love
Or bright, blue money
Or fickle fame.

I shall never grieve with Seamus Heaney,
Not with salt tears,
Or bitter smiles,
Or sweet songs.

Instead, I shall laugh with the chevalier of
Hals,
Shall render Ranuccio as the Baptist,
And give of my unbleached titanium hair
To Medusa, whose fate was purest satire.

And walk, with Behemoth, on both my hind
legs,
And dance with Toulouse-Latrec--
No need to bend double,
I am already so, so small.

With Israfel sing, for I am young
And alive, and hoarfrost is strange to me.
My hair, strong and black
And still short as a boy's;

With all of my joy I will be
Young, for as long as is needful.
And then I will twine
Myself in his wedding-gown doom.
(finis)
Friday, 22 February, 2008
9h0am

Pacific

I am your Endymion
O, my Selene--
Undying and beautiful
As you commanded.
I wait, my eternal sleep
A thing of the past.
A fragile thing,
Broken, for how could it last?

Yet she, so golden and so fair,
Entwined in Apollo's light
So bright and dead,
Is yet a dish of apples in a crust--
With caramel sweetened is her breath,
With my longing flavoured,
Beauty-crisp in glory found.

O, but my lady is a Lazarene,
The fair flame-bird
Burnt in Oriental spices,
Forever, like me, to slake her hunger
Upon my bovine backbone.
But she is my weight to bear,
And mine alone--
In yielding to you,
I am resilient as stone.
(finis)
Thursday, 21 February, 2008
7h01 pm

Marble-tongued

So it's been a while since I last made a proper post. Those of you who have half a brain will know how busy I've been...meetings, more meetings, reading, studying, applying the self to evermore fascinating endeavours. Well, despite the massive attack of motion that has lately swallowed me whole, I have managed to get a couple other things done.
I also finished the central subject of the Mucha copy I was doing, and the surrounding (original) design elements will be soon forthcoming, if I can manage to sit down for long enough to dredge something up.
I had a dream about rock-climbing last night. I wasn't rock-climbing myself, I was watching about thirty boys clamber about on a cliff face, and sometimes, one of them would let themselves fall, and the others would grab him. Then I sprained my ankle.
I dreamt about pixies, too. Not The Pixies, though 'Cactus' has been tickling through my head. No...no, real pixies. The sort that feed off various human energies and will do anything to carry on feeding. The sort that fix all your problems and disappear into your rubbish bin before you can see them, really. But it was a bit of a discomfiting dream, and I won't carry on with it here.
I'm glancing over at my workspace right now, at my palette, with its unusual colours on it. I have a fun time mixing for this Mucha copy, but they're colours I rarely use. For example, I used a minty-green-blue sort of pastel colour, and I used some cad yellow dark, which, also, I don't favour, except in skintones. And I mostly emptied my tube of unbleached titanium. I'll need to run out for some more next Monday before I start my new project.
Oh! Speaking of which. I have a very ambitious project. Remember that grisaille portrait I was going on about? Well, I've started it. I gridded the photograph I'm copying it from, and gridded the canvas likewise. It's going to end up 30x26 inches, which is very convenient for me. Nice how they sell most canvases in the 'golden rectangle,' in perfect ratio. Now, if only I can find an old nautilus shell...
Oh, Lord, someone stop me. I'm on the rampage.
Yes of course. I cut my hair yesterday. It was nearly to my shoulders, in the back, and I chopped it all back up to my back hairline. All that stifling hair, gone. Lovely. I'm sure I wrote a poem at some point during the past week, but I don't think it's worth reading. But...you be the judge. Not you, Dre, you still haven't commented on my Sonnet V.

She sang for absolution
Every night after supper.
And the crazy thing about it was
That she never quite recovered,
Never saved our great nation.

I stood in the cage beside her,
Hung my hat up on a peg.
And I danced all afternoon beside her,
But I didn't draw a dime.
And I guess she deserved it.

Maybe that's just a story for another day.
Come help me burn the flag.
Come help me read the newspaper.
Help me walk,
Help me dance.

My fingertips crack
On these old metal strings.
And my heart broke with her neck,
When they sang, 'Penny for the Guy'
In the streets of London.

I've heard a lot of songs,
But never one so sad as yours,
Never one so bad as yours.
Do you think you'd mind
Performing for the Rolling Stones?

Sonnet V

O, Bedlam, where Osiris chases
Round my cinder effigies
Emergents from inferno blazes--
Scourges them to bright frenzies,
The matron of delerium
With condor wings shall be the fleetest,
Across old, vast Ephesium
To sting the Muse who sings the sweetest.
And I, suspended 'tween the years,
Shall wield the sickle-bladed moon
Against the necks of vanquished fears,
And bravery is new-illum'd.
Ennobled by your violent rages,
My ink-stained mind adorns these pages.
(finis)
Friday, 8 February, 2008
12:50p

A Winter's Tale

I'm on a bit of a Shakespeare kick. I remember the first one I ever had, I was thirteen, living in a flat on Le Loi Street right across the street from Ho Chi Minh City Central Park, giggling at the antics of the two Antipholus and Dromios, coming out of my Bard-induced trance every few hours to run down to Ben Thanh Market and gulp down a bowl of hot pho bo or three fresh spring rolls. I never was big on the sonnets, though my favourites are ten, twenty-seven, and forty-two. I didn't give much consideration to the ones that were popular, and I still find that iambic pentametre is exceedingly heavy handed.
But I was in the shower this morning, thinking about sonnet twenty-eight, and I could only remember about nine lines. I dropped off starting from 'I tell the day to please him, thou art bright' &c. And despite not particularly liking that sonnet, I was a bit upset. I should have a better memory than this. I remember all the lyrics from the memory book tapes, and a song was playing the other day that I haven't heard since I was seven or eight, but I remembered it verbatim. In any event, last night I watched Much Ado About Nothing, and, despite Keanu Reeves' dolorous mealymouthed woodenness, I grinned and giggled myself all the way through. Alan Rickman should have been John the Bastard. He would have been just edible. Almost as edible as when he was Colonel Brandon. But I digress.
I was feeling nostalgic for the times when I had the leisure to read for hours on end, and emerge only for food and piano lessons. I miss the people in Saigon that I loved, and it's for them that I scrounged for this little piece of pensive brilliance, despite that it is gentler than my tastes in poetry run.

Sonnet XXX
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moon,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
(finis)

She Lingers My Desires

So, it's chilly, isn't it? Not nearly, my loves, as it is in Iceland. Which, apparently, is a city in Australia, which really is Burrito-land, in which they speak the language of Burrito.
I did something naughty last night. After forcing myself through another bit of creative writing, which involved Queen Pasiphaë and, peculiarly enough, Diogenes. But only the Diogenes Club inhabited by the most unclubbable men in London, I got on youtube. The great, evil timesucker. And I watched half of Monster by Dylan Moran. And I'm sure I got loads of naughty thoughts about soup with noodles, children's parties, and wine.
But that's not the naughty thing I did. The naughty thing I did was to stay up past bedtime, and subsequently to wake at four the next morning. This means, of course, that my next piece of creative writing is going to involve twelve year old boys struggling through a sudden bizarre streak of divinatory brilliance, strawberries, a cruciform sword as opposed to the rapier, and the significance of Daniel Craig as a lust object.
Obviously, I'm going to be more interested in someone like Nic Cester, but notwithstanding.
I wanted to say something, but the first paragraph of A Midsummer Night's Dream keeps rushing through my mind. Maybe it's just the fault of the cat looking so dreadfully comfy curled up by the fire, or maybe it's that I'm for some reason mind-numbingly happy despite the ache in my veins that is the absence of coffee (I'm soh healthy). Or, perhaps, it's that I'm craving Les Misérables. You choose. But eat this nonsense. I'm getting back into insightful imagery, at least.

O, Ariadne, with your moon-calf eyes,
Enmeshed in Dionysius' everlasting arms,
You grew vine-twigs in your rumpled hair,
Your ravishment a thing of beauty,
Weave your sister's widow's weeds,
Hephaestus will illumine her grave.

Mangroves in Drought

a crisp, new note, drawn out
far longer than it should have been.
i cast my net without a thought
for what i might drag in.

Apologies for Lack of Form will be Forthcoming

I am only as old as the Netherlands,
Fit only for Muspelheim's army.
I am only so bold as the golestan,
Frayed rose-petals greying and tawdry.
Ascend, and draw near, in the absence of cheer,
Have we ever seen battles so tragic?
It is neither the rain nor the absence of pain
Which causes the rats and the traffic.

And did your agate eyes form newly
The bright and belligerent knell?
How could we convene in this hell
As faint colours arrested me truly?
And never did Orpheus play quite so well,
Nor his lyre so gravely attest
This depravity grim, molestation so trim,
He has given us beauty, at best.

But ghostly, then, I scattered flowers
Down upon the scarrèd street,
Then waited I for those small hours,
When Mercurius flies his most fleet.
And upon this side of the grave
Did I think myself, rightly, a knave--
I did tumble my mind till it was bone-dry
And the airs I assumed, rather brave.
The End

My God, what manner of nonsense is this?
I am so, so sorry.
It was all extempore.
I have no excuse for it. Though the first two lines are sodding fantastic.

Double Down

I have gotten into making playlists. I never used to. I've always just queued up the songs I wanted, but I actually have saved a couple playlists for my moods. Three, in fact. Two of them are bittersweet, country, rockabilly, and a little rawky nonsense chucked in. One is out and out depressing. So depressing that it, in fact, includes 'London Rain' by Heather Nova. Yep. It's that bad.
No, really. When I said I was facing different pressures this year, I didn't mean that I wasn't under any. There's always pressure. But there's always someone to give it to, fortunately. Someone who will be wearing a magnificent dress on New Year's.
Consider yourself warned.
Also, I don't believe I've bothered posting my latest piece of poetry up here. That is because it's rather bad, and in a breathless metre that is almost off, but not really quite. Have at.

The Alchemist
Turn my leaden heart to gold
Seize my misbegotten rapture.
Increasing life by eighteen-fold
Increasing chances of recapture.

I have never eaten anguish
In such sweetbread complications.
And my life has never languished
Through my lips in mad gyrations.

We are baking, twice-mixed bricks
Submitted to the kingly Nile
We are scalding and transfixed
We are marching, rank and file.

There is glory, yes, in love,
And no less shame than in submission,
But I have proffered up my glove--
A challenge of my own volition.
Tuesday, 20 November, 2007
8:52 am

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